The History and Future of Places – Part 10: Digital connectivity and the global village

Last week I looked at how overtourism has increased strain on places marketed as “destinations” to an increasingly mobile global population. 

Airbnb, and indeed all the booking, control and GPS systems that make international travel affordable, owe their success to the invention of the worldwide web in 1989. Inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s intention was to create “an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere, to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.” In other words, to make all places equal for the purpose of communication. Electronic media had been shrinking the world since the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s. Crucially, it had happened from the top-down, at the instigation of institutions, corporations and broadcasters. The web transferred that ability on to individuals, making us all potential producers of media, able to share information regardless of where we happen to be.

The web was supplemented by search engines (Google in the late 90s), social media platforms (Facebook, 2004, YouTube, 2005) and smart phones (iPhone 2007). Together these opened a floodgate. In 1990 there were few million internet users, mostly in universities. This number has grown to 4.5 billion active users today, each spending an average of 3 hours-a-day online. A change of behaviour of this magnitude must have had an impact on places. But, as we know from the invention of the print press, the initial effects of innovations in communications media on the physical character of places can be slight. This is true even if the long-term social and experiential effects might be profound. The dramatic popularization of electronic media is so recent and still in process that its effects are open to diverse interpretations.

First of all, it is worth noting that the direct impacts of electronic media on the forms and appearance of places have so far been incremental. Poles, wires, satellite dishes, buried cables and wireless signals have left existing built forms mostly as they were.

Electronic media have changed experiences of places – though exactly how is open to interpretation. At the most personal level Sharon Kleinman refers to the consequences of talking on mobile phones in public spaces, scarcely aware of what is around us, as “displacing place.” On the other hand, locative media (smart phones, tablets) always know our location and can combine immediate experience with online data about place (wayfinding and amenities). It has therefore been argued that, by drawing information into and out of a place, they enhance place experiences. 

At a larger social scale Joshua Meyerowitz argued in his book No Sense of Place, that, “Where one is has less and less to do with what one knows and experiences.” In other words, social relationships are no longer dependent on local communities.

The web has no landscape and no geography. The communities that exist there are non-place communities, formed on the basis of shared interests. These can be short-lived, sometimes generating so-called “smart mobs” of people who don’t know one another yet react compulsively to online memes about events or attractions. This can lead to behaviour that spills over into real places. In 2019, tens of thousands of people visited California’s Lake Elsinore to take selfies amid the spectacularly blooming wildflowers – an event remembered variously as “the superbloom” or “flowergeddon”. Smart mob behaviour may also lie in the background of overtourism, prompted by websites that promote iconic attractions and destinations.

More positive manifestations of non-place communities that impact actual places include the Città Slow movement that began in Italy as a celebration of local food and culture. It is now an interconnected global phenomenon. City Mayors is an online network that promotes “good, open and strong local government” by enabling cities around the world to learn from each other and act together. However, non-place virtual communities also form around anti-social, prejudicial convictions that are amplified in on-line echo chambers and filter bubbles. These, too, can spill over into real world behaviours, such as acts of terrorism and attacks on mosques and synagogues.

A more direct manifestation of the role of electronic media in places occurs in attempts to design smart cities. Critics of smart cities, and indeed the entire tech industry, see them as engaged in data gathering that involves constant surveillance and invasion of privacy. Many cities are now festooned with security cameras. Some operate facial recognition technology, ostensibly for security. Shenzen has 159 cameras per 1,000 residents, London 68. It seems likely that the places of the future will be data collection machines. Whether the purpose of this data collection will be surveillance or improved urban management is not so clear.

More than fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan, perhaps most famous for coining the idea of the global village, wrote presciently about the social impacts of electronic media. Electronic communications, he said, circle the world at the speed of light, compress time and space, and “turn the world back in on itself in a global embrace.” This global embrace, he believed, would mean that person-to-person relationships take on the emotional and social characteristics of oral cultures, as if in “the smallest village.” The global village, instead, is not an electronic melting pot, but filled with trivial electronic gossip from elsewhere. It is often abrasive and serves to magnify personal concerns and emotions. It is, in effect, superimposed on the countless material places inherited from previous centuries. Skyscrapers, suburbs and megacities are not easily changed – at least in the short run. What can be upset are ideas of history, geography, truth, reason and the ways we experience places. In the global village it seems that the significance of places as discrete, material entities has been diminished and compressed.

In the words of French urbanist Paul Virilio: “In the age of the speed of light, what cropped up yesterday, here and there, now happens everywhere at once. There is no longer ‘here,’ everything is ‘now.’”